Milk and Honey, or Silk and Money?

For past month and a half, I’ve been working at an asset management fund (my finance friends tell me to call it a hedge fund for the CLOUT but I couldn’t tell you the difference). It’s been a lot of fun! I like my coworkers, there’s snacks, we get lunch ordered in, the offices all have a great view of the city, and they’re giving me projects where I get to learn a little bit about infance, but the problems I’m solving are almost entirely based on things that I know/things that are pretty likely to be useful for what I might want to do in the future. I’ve had to do ML without a GPU. So that’s been tough. But fun! While waiting for the simplest of tasks to finish, I’ve been reading a shit ton of papers and blog posts.

I’ll be honest, coming into the summer, I abhorred the financial industry. I think it’s incredibly necessary; companies need to get funded, people need to be able to take out loans. My major qualms about it were drawn mostly from The Big Short (a fantastic movie that made me want to throw things and kill the first banking boi I saw) and my ANGEL of a roommate Nicholas “Nickypoo” Branigan, who is the rarest of all animals: a non-finance Econ major. The problems are interesting, but as Nickypoo put it: “Yeah, but should the smartest fucking people we know be making powerpoint slides day?” To top it off, I can be the first person to tell you that the math that they use is from the 1800’s and mfing ridge regression/L2-regularization/”let’s make the numbers in our model small so they can’t get TOO wild” is groundbreaking shit. On the other end of the spectrum, I was reading a book called “Advance in Machine Learning for Finance” and the author says (and I’m only exaggerating a little bit) “if you’re not investing in a quantum computer now, you’re a PUSSY”

However, the money is ridiculous. And I like to eat well.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while: how much money do you need? Ultimately, I think money is a proxy for some degree of agency, which is (to put it extremely tackily) the objective function that we’re optimizing for. If you accept (and if you’re roommates with Nickypoo, you almost certainly will accept) that the upper bound on our agency is much, much lower than we’ve been taught, coupled with the fact that there tends to be a HUGE marginal cost for increases in capital, ADDITIONALLY coupled with the fact that as an educated American with a Chinese face, if you move to China you can essentially make money appear out of thin air… I don’t think I’ll become a banking boi.

That being said! This summer I’ve met really cool people at work who like what they do and are compensated for doing it, and they certainly don’t fit any Wolf of Wall Street caricature of what someone in finance is. There are certainly healthier niches within the finance industry, and since I’ve literally only been on Earth for twenty years, spending an insignificant portion of that time learning how to not poop on myself, the priors I have about the world are still very much not set in stone.

At the same time, I’ve grown less bullish on tech. First of all, let’s establish that using the word “tech” to describe an industry is dumb. Technology is such a broad term that pervades literally any industry you will end up working in, unless you are Amish. Actually, as an Amish (as I’m typing that it feels wrong but whatever) you’re competing against tech, so it literally touches everything. At a lunch, my boss and my quant team were talking and she said “Y’know, sometimes I read about criticisms of finance, but hey, at least we don’t work at Facebook right?” As I’ve started following prominent ML twitter accounts, I’ve grown more and more skeptical of the overblown promises and blind throwing of cash surrounding large swaths of industry (I talk about things I like in the “Things I’ve Consumed” section! Also, the irony that you probably saw this through a link on Facebook is not lost on me). This is probably fodder for a later post, and my fingers are tired.

Anyways, I have nooooooo idea what I really want to do in the future, but I think I’m finding myself moving away from the Four Career Horsemen of the Formal Colonials (Doctors, Lawyers, Bankers, and Engineers).

That was a mostly incoherent jumble of words that leads me to the REAL REASON I’m writing this week (literally I have no opinions on anything. My initial answer to every question is “It depends” and I take a fairly vanilla stance on pretty much all issues since I have little to no background knowledge on anything. I’m like a politician that’s running for nothing.)

Things I’ve Eaten

Thursday Kitchen - I love tapas. Especially Asian tapas. I went with some NEW FRIENDS (see Mom! I won’t die COMPLETELY alone) to this place, 4.5 stars on yelp. Good lord. If I didn’t have a presentation the next day I totally would have ordered the ADULT ALCOHOLIC GLOW IN THE DARK LYCHEE CAPRI SUN. Every single fucking small plate was delicious. Could not recommend more.

Luke’s Lobster Roll - For the price? Not the best. But as my man DJ says, “at some point you gotta stop going for bang for buck, and just go for bang.” Delicious but small and pricy.

Habibi Halal Food - This was on last week’s, but whatever. They have the elusive green sauce, which is not like a pesto-green but like a bright neon green which is kind of startling but it’s fine. It was raining and I didn’t want to eat in my room so I sat in a Chipotle and chowed down and I didn’t want to draw suspicion to myself so I drank out of the fucking free cups they put out for hot sauce of whatever LOL

Pizza Loves Emily - Waited two hours. 28 dollar burger. It was the best burger I’ve ever had though. Dry aged patties, EMMY sauce (dunno what it is but it was delicious), the only pretzel bun I’ve ever liked, melted cheese. But the best part? The pickles. I let out a small moan on the first bite.

Thai Villa - After 1000+ reviews on yelp, still a 4.5! Delicious food, great restaurant aesthetic, and great service!!!

Ess a Bagel - Big mistake. Waited half an hour for a fucking 16 dollar monstrosity of a lox bagel. It was good but I was ready to throw hands by minute 20.

Perry Street - Some bougie ass shit (Restaurant Week though! Hallelujah). The street looked like it was out of NOVA, not NYC. I had gazpacho for the first time: if you also watched that Cartoon Network show Chowder when you were a little kid, and loved the character Gazpacho who was like a large brown furry wooly mammoth, you were also extremely surprised when it turned out to be sour tomato soup. The appetizer was disappointing but the entree and dessert were great!

Things I’ve Watched

Coco - So FUCKING good. I love how they had MIGUEL sing the Oscar winning song (the main character is named Miguel). The animation is just stunning, the plot twist was DELICIOUS, and it was an excellently paced, well-voice-acted, well-written movie.

Eighth Grade - I love Bo Burnham. But this was not as good as I thought it would be. Everything about the movie was great (the lighting, cinematography, acting, sound choice) except the writing!!!! The ending was too clean, and it didnt tackle the problems of social media or of crippling social anxiety as well as I’d hoped. It definitely had its moments, but after watching make happy and loving it OH so much, this was a bit of a letdown.

John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous - I watched this live in Baltimore and it was like a top 5 2-hour time period of my life. I don’t think I ever laughed that hard. Even though I’ve seen a lot of the jokes, his Netflix special DESTROYED ME. I was fuckin hOWLING

Robert Sapolsky’s Lectures on Human Behavioral Biology - The best lecturer I’ve had the luck to witness; only Jonathan Osborne, Drew Endy and Keith Schwarz come remotely close. Incredibly fascinating content that everyone should learn! Intentionally oversimplified for a general audience, but the fundamental ideas still come through!

Things I’ve Read

God’s Lonely Men: ‘Taxi Driver’ in the Age of the Incels The Ringer remains one of my favorite ways to start the day, and this is why; you get Shea Serrano, whose Twitter and short pieces are some of the funniest things you’ll find on the Internet, and really good longform pieces like these (in related news, I’m gonna be using the phrase ‘WASP Goddess’ more).

Goodbye to All That - Joan Didion is a queen, and this essay about being young in New York propelled her to fame. It is a GREAT read.

Plus, Zero, Minus - My friend Victoria’s new blog! She rates things as Plus, Zero, or Minus.

Approximately Correct - An AI blog written by an assistant professor at CMU. I think it has a lot of good articles about not getting caught up in the storm of a lot of machine learning.

Virtual Adversarial Training - I like this paper! It presents a way to use adversarial examples for semi-supervised learning, which is especially relevant for what I have to do for work.

‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong - Because Elon Musk is the fucking WORST.

Sour Heart - I’m still working my way through this thorny masterpiece of a book. It is fucking brutal but beautifully written.

Conference Room, Five Minutes - Shea Serrano, top five human being on earth, has written a series of illustrated essays about The Office, one of my favorite TV shows ever. As always, he is hilarious.